Esther Perel’s suave, crowd-pleasing take on surviving infidelity.

Charlotte Shane

The State of Affairs:

Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

Harper

$26.99 List Price

“We never know our partner as well as we think we do,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes in Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006), a guide for couples weathering periods of sexual disconnection. Even after many years, she points out, your partner can be inscrutable, as hard as you try to convince yourself you know them—or, worse, that there’s nothing much to know. “The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours,” Perel continues, whereas “in truth, their separateness is unassailable.”

Her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (Harper, $27), is about the crisis that ensues when that separateness can no longer be denied—or you realize you tied yourself to a sex-addicted, egomaniacal monster (or both). I kid, mostly. True to form, the unfailingly empathetic Perel—Belgian expat; multilinguist; sexual sophisticate—dismisses the notion that infidelity must automatically involve a villain and a victim, or that it necessarily means there’s anything amiss with a couple’s bond. “What if the affair had nothing to do with you?” she suggests to the wronged party at the start of chapter 9, “Even Happy People Cheat.” Later, she uses a magnanimous we to align herself with the transgressor: “Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become.” It’s a neat trick, this first-person plural, because it pulls in the wronged party, too. Cheating isn’t the only form of turning away—as many cheaters will eagerly tell you.

The State of Affairs is

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